“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” - Albert Einstein
Unrelenting rain. Five days without sun. Water covers everything. It sits in muddy puddles on a potholed track. It drips from ferns that unravel slowly across the understory of an ancient forest. It cascades down a narrow valley, slowly carving through the clay and schist, gently turning a hydroelectric wheel round and round — providing a slow trickle of power to a small house that is almost unnoticeable to the outside world, nestled deep within the hillside.
Gently blending into the surrounding landscape of the Serra do Açor, this off-grid paradise belongs to Wendy Howard, and as would be expected of her character, it is not like many other places.
I first discovered Wendy when I was researching about alternative living in Central Portugal. For one reason or another, the valleys around Benfeita in the Serra do Açor have become a beacon for those who are searching for another way to live.
Hippies, anarchists, off-gridders, preppers, farmers and artists of all ages and nationalities reside throughout these hills. Waves of immigration over the past two decades have seen these semi-abandoned valleys slowly repopulating — answering a call back to the land which has brought with it a flux of change, in ways both good and bad.
Living in a rented cottage in the Scottish Borders in the early 2000s, Wendy was feeling this call increasingly strongly but, knowing the chances were slim to do what she envisaged with land ownership patterns and prices in the UK, started looking further afield. During a trip to volunteer on a homestead in the Coimbra region in 2008, she realised she had found the country and area she was looking for and returned shortly afterwards to search for land. She was drawn to the mountains, waters and soils of the schist lands, where she purchased one of many abandoned quintas in one of the steepest and most sparsely populated regions of Portugal.
The land that she calls home bears little resemblance now to what it was before she arrived. Pixelated photos show derelict farm buildings of schist, dry stone constructions of the natural building material for which this region is famous. The empty terraces built from the same stone are devoid of diversity, covered in bracken and brambles and visibly abandoned.
Fast forward 16 years, and it appears like a scene straight out of a fairytale. Flowing water cascades through the lush valley food forest, guided by ancient stone walls and irrigation channels of Moorish design, a relic of the Arabic influence which echoes throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Fern, moss and pennywort spring forth between the cracks, nourished by the humidity of this unique microclimate.
The element of water is something which has a strong presence in this part of the country. It is known as the green heart of Portugal due to the abundance of rivers, waterfalls and forest coverage, yet the juxtaposition with the risk of wildfire offers a strange contrast. Wet and humid winters give way for immense growth in the heat of summer, especially in monocultures of fast-growing flammable tree species, which, combined with the lack of rainfall for months on end creates the perfect conditions for combustion.
In 2017, Wendy experienced the force of the fire to its fullest extent. Only a few months after a devastating fire near Pedrogão Grande which cost the lives of 66 people, a firestorm swept across the Serra do Açor, claiming another 45 lives, burning thousands of hectares, reducing homes to ash and destroying approximately 80% of the forests in the Açor region. After watching the fire engulf the ridges surrounding Benfeita, cutting off the valleys completely, she evacuated to the shelter of the nearby village as the entire surrounding landscape was incinerated. With her land, one building nearing completion and substantial investment in tools and infrastructure were consumed in the flames. Over 20 friends and neighbours also lost their homes.
Far from altering her direction, the devastation strengthened her resolve and, steered by strong intuitive guidance allied to an academic background in biology and ecology, took her regenerative environmental work to the next level. While slowly recovering her land and buildings — work that’s still ongoing 7 years later — she and her neighbours founded a local association, ArBOR, dedicated to regeneration of both local ecosystem and its human culture.
This process of being informed by a more primitive guidance system is a defining quality of how she chooses to live. It is a way of being which is shaped by intuition in primacy to intellect, by human conceptual modelling in service to nature’s intelligence.
When I visited her for a few days back in November, this was a subject which we explored in the first episode in a series of films produced by Serra — Primal: Closer to Source. Watch the film here.
Thanks for reading,
Adrian
To learn more about Wendy and her permaculture project, click here.